Original subtitles

They built the largest, most complex machine in history,

to probe the deepest mysteries of the early universe,

as it was at the beginning of time

The Large Hadron Collider is allowing us to see right back

to ten to the minus 12 seconds after the Big Bang

Within two massive detectors,

in conditions harsher even than outer space,

tiny particles smash together at nearly the speed of light

unleashing incredible energy

Trying to figure out

what happens in the collision of two protons at very high energy

is like analyzing what happens

in the high-speed collision of two garbage trucks

Within that spray of debris, physicists search

for a tiny bundle of energy, a subatomic particle

proof of an invisible energy field that fills all of space

It just may be

the most important feature of our universe

Without it

There are no atoms,

there's no chemistry, there's no life

50 years of effort, $10 billion,

and thousands of researchers around the world

For them, the stakes have never been higher

It's practically

my whole professional life that's led to this point

It's the moment of truth when science flips the switch

on the Big Bang Machine

One, zero

Right now, on NOVA.

In Europe, a stunning announcement

One of the world's most-wanted fugitives

has finally been captured

Done!

The announcement came

at the end of a high-speed, high-stakes chase

A mystery

300 people were hot on the trail

Decades worth of work

It was a truly international effort

that drew to its dramatic conclusion here

It's a historic milestone today

On the border of France and Switzerland,

300 feet below ground

But this wasn't a search for some outlaw

or criminal mastermind

It was a hunt for something far more elusive

An unstable bundle of energy far smaller than an atom

that winks out of existence

in a trillion trillionth of a second

It's evidence of a force that fills all of space,

completely invisible, and yet without it,

life, earth, the universe we know could not exist

Finding this elusive particle marks the end of a quest

that required constructing the largest, most complex machine

the world has ever seen

A quest that consumed nearly half a century,

billions of dollars,

and asked thousands of scientists across the globe

to invest years, even decades of their careers

with no guarantee of success

I got a job to do this in 1993

It's eleventh year now

About ten years, me

Yeah, and about five years for me

20 years, something like that

Since 1994, I guess

It's practically my whole professional life

that's led to this point

The discovery has been hailed

as one of the greatest scientific victories of all time

and has already won the Nobel Prize

It's an enormous triumph

This was my generation's Manhattan Project,

and I wanted to be on the inside looking out

It's been extremely exciting

But what is this mysterious quarry?

What does it actually do?

And why was finding it so important?

That story begins at the very beginning of time,

when the universe came into being in a massive explosion

called the Big Bang

So here we have the Big Bang

Billions of years ago

Deserves a little bit of color, I think

And then the timeline of the universe

This is where we are

This now the age of the universe,

like 13 7 billion years after the Big Bang

And so working backwards, we had the dinosaurs

So here's a dinosaur

Then life itself, first DNA was about four billion years ago

Before DNA, there was the earth

Before that, the first stars

Before them, just atoms

While atoms were once thought to consist

of just three basic particles...

Neutrons, protons and electrons...

Physicists now know some of these are made

of even more fundamental stuff...

The basic building blocks of our universe

The big question then is

where did those building blocks come from?

The answer to all that lies in the first second

In the first instant of existence,

when the universe was unimaginably hot,

the cosmos was filled with identical bundles of energy

moving at the speed of light,

all indistinguishable from one another

But then something changed

Distinct types of particles emerged

with different properties, like electric charge

and mass, what we experience as weight

Now we live in a universe full of tangible stuff

And while that monumental shift from nothing to something

must have happened almost immediately,

how it happened

was one of the biggest unanswered questions in physics

The mysteries of existence lie within this second

Certainly we understand the science,

we understand the physics

Work backwards into this second,

but at some point we just run out of knowledge

And the Large Hadron Collider is allowing us to see

right back to ten to the minus 12 seconds after the Big Bang

Beyond that, here be dragons or dinosaurs

The Large Hadron Collider is a massive particle accelerator,

the largest machine in the world,

designed to simulate the universe as it was

a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang

To solve the mystery of mass, it smashes protons together

at energy so high

that it is capable of testing an idea first suggested in 1964

by several scientists around the world,

including a young theoretical physicist named Peter Higgs

His mathematics suggested that right after the Big Bang,

an invisible energy field was somehow switched on

and now fills the entire universe

Just the way that a magnetic field affects some materials

but not others, he suggested that this new field

selectively affects some fundamental particles,

causing some of them to take on mass

Very massive particles

like the quarks that make up protons and neutrons

interact strongly with this field

Electrons, which form the outer shells of atoms,

interact less strongly and are very lightweight

And still others, like photons, particles of light,

have no mass, because they don't interact with the field at all

The theory implied that a universe without a Higgs field

might not be a very friendly place

And that got people's attention

If there were no Higgs mechanism,

elementary particles wouldn't have mass

If electrons didn't have mass,

that means they would move at the speed of light

And if electrons moved at the speed of light,

electrons do not settle down into atoms

And if electrons do not settle down into atoms,

there are no atoms, there are no molecules,

there's no chemistry, there's no life

Nothing

It would look nothing like what we see today

We wouldn't be here,

and there would be no physicists to ask these questions

When Higgs submitted his theory to a journal,

the editors based at CERN rejected it

My reaction was

that they clearly hadn't understood what I was saying

Undeterred, he revised the paper,

adding a paragraph saying, in effect,

that if the field exists, we should find evidence of it

in the form of a particle that would turn up in an accelerator

In other words, if you smash particles together

energetically, you'll make a ripple in the field

And if you apply enough energy,

you just might be able to detect it in the form of a particle

The second time around,

an American journal published the paper

and Peter Higgs got a lot of credit

But in reality, the idea was cooked up independently

by a bunch of scientists:

Philip Anderson, Robert Brout, François Englert,

Gerry Guralnik, Carl R Hagen,

Peter Higgs, Tom Kibble, Gerard 't Hooft

Some have suggested that it really should be called this

But since that's impossible to pronounce,

it's simply called the Higgs field

Gradually, the theory gained support,

but without the evidence of a particle,

now called the Higgs boson, it remained unproven

To be honest, we weren't sure that the Higgs existed

Mr Higgs and his collaborators were saying that there was

an invisible energy field everywhere in the universe

So the "invisible" sounds a little odd,

and the "everywhere in the universe" also sounds

kind of far-fetched

So that was a lot for people to swallow

There were many people who thought

this can't be the answer

I've heard people describe it as a trick,

a mathematical trick to make the equations work out

Finding something that's all around us

is surprisingly tricky

Because the Higgs boson doesn't actually exist

At least not in any form that we can easily detect

So in 1998, scientists from around the world came together

at CERN, the Center for European Nuclear Research,

located on the border of France and Switzerland,

to build a particle accelerator that would have enough power

to create such a profound disturbance in the Higgs field

that the predicted Higgs bosons would pop into existence

and present themselves

But easier said than done

In order to find this particle,

we had to build this complex, cutting-edge accelerator

The work is the work of thousands of people

20 years of effort went into building these detectors

20 years of efforts of the international community

From dozens of nations,

with the U S contributing $500 million

It took $10 billion and ten years

to complete the Large Hadron Collider,

a massive masterpiece of engineering,

to find one of the tiniest pieces of the cosmos

It's a very cool and expensive eye

that can look at very, very small distances

like about a billionth of a billionth of a meter

We designed this machine

so that wherever the Higgs boson would be,

we would be able to find it

Flushing the Higgs out of hiding

begins in a modest little red bottle full of hydrogen atoms,

the smallest and most abundant element in the universe

All the protons that we use at CERN are taken

from a bottle that size

They start their journey here and they continue

down this orange line, and that is the linear accelerator

Trillions of hydrogen atoms stripped of their electrons

are injected into the collider

Every 12 seconds

ten to the power 14 protons are being accelerated

down that line

The protons accelerate around larger and larger loops

until they are finally directed into the main ring

To keep the increasingly energetic particles confined,

the LHC relies on immensely powerful magnetic fields

generated by 1,232 primary superconducting magnets,

cooled to just a few degrees above absolute zero

by 120 tons of liquid helium

After about 20 minutes of acceleration,

each bunch of protons is moving at nearly the speed of light,

with as much energy as an onrushing locomotive

Finally the protons are carefully steered

into violent head-on collisions

converting the huge energy into showers of exotic,

energetic particles, scattering in all directions,

many decaying into showers of even more particles,

setting the stage for the hard work of detecting the Higgs

Trying to figure out what happens

in the collision of two protons at very high energy

is like analyzing what happens

in the high-speed collision of two garbage trucks

Garbage is spread all over everything,

and most of it is garbage in the sense that it's not interesting

It's old stuff that we already knew about

And in all this garbage that's spraying out

in all directions on the highway,

you have to find the golden needle,

the rare artifact that you're looking for, the Higgs boson,

something entirely new

To the scientists at CERN,

a collection of physicists from all over the world,

the stuff produced in these powerful collisions

is anything but garbage

Each particle has a well-understood identity,

described with great precision

in one of the most accurate theories ever devised

to explain the workings of the universe

It's called the Standard Model,

and one of its key contributors is Frank Wilczek

Hi, welcome

Come on in

A lot of what I do is really just play

I mean, I play with the equations and ideas

All that playing won Frank a Nobel Prize

for his contribution to the Standard Model

Well, what have we got here?

It looks like an instrument of torture for the mind

The Standard Model is essentially an understanding

of how all the known pieces of the universe fit together,

except for the mechanism of gravity,

creating a mind-boggling tapestry

This is going to be a hell of a puzzle

to figure out

All right, now, a promising start

We think the Standard Model contains all you need

in principle to describe how molecules behave,

all of chemistry, how stars work, all of astrophysics...

Not only how things behave, but what can exist

These are the rules of the game

The ingredients of the Standard Model are of three basic sorts

There's what you might broadly call matter

That's sort of lumps of stuff

that have a certain degree of permanence

And these are, on the one hand, quarks

They include the building blocks of protons and neutrons

and atomic nuclei

And leptons

Most prominent lepton in everyday life

is certainly the electron

So those are matter particles

On the other side, we have what you might call force particles

or force mediators

Called "bosons,"

some of these particles are more like lumps of energy

They transmit the forces

that bring the matter particles to life

They include the photon,

which carries the electromagnetic force;

the gluons that carry the strong force

which holds protons and neutrons together;

and the W and Z bosons that are responsible

for the weak force governing radioactivity

With just this small list of ingredients,

the Standard Model explains the physical properties

of the elementary building blocks of nature

The Standard Model is just a handful of particles and forces,

and it explains every experiment ever done

by every human being in the history of science

So it's quite impressive in what it's managed to do

It explains how stars burn

It explains how radioactivity occurs

It explains how chemistry works

It explains how light works

It's an amazing theory

The first particles were discovered in experiments

and became the foundation for the Standard Model

But then the theorists took over

and all the particles discovered in the last 40 years

were first predicted by the mathematics

of the Standard Model and then found experimentally

The Higgs boson, a force particle, was the last

and most challenging piece of the puzzle

That's why finding it was such an obsession among theorists

and experimentalists alike

In September 2008, with much fanfare

the giant accelerator was switched on

The LHC was ready to go to work

It was an exciting time, full of high expectations

Designing and building this machine,

it's just incredible to see it come to life

But then, just nine days after start-up

disaster struck

It was 11:00 in the morning,

and I got a call to come over, something looks serious

And when I got over there, I had never seen such carnage

A short circuit burned a hole

in a giant container of liquid helium used to cool the magnets

Six tons of helium was released into the tunnel

and more than 50 of the giant magnets were fried

The $10 billion LHC was dead in the water

Undaunted, engineers worked to repair the machine

and physicists continued to refine the computer programs

that would analyze the vast amount of data

that the LHC would produce

once it was running at full power

Three, two, one

By late 2009, after 14 months of repair work and reengineering,

the LHC was more robust than ever

and finally ready to begin the hunt in earnest

Now, protons are whizzing both ways around the ring

at nearly the speed of light

At the center of the two Higgs detectors, the beams cross

inside ATLAS, a massive machine the size of a cathedral

and also within its smaller cousin, CMS

Even though the beams are microscopically small,

the vast majority of particles contained in them

whiz past each other without incident

When you collide 100 billion protons and 100 billion protons,

most of the protons are just seeing each other

and going, "Hello," and going on

But about 800 million times every second,

pairs of protons meet head-on

What's called a "hard collision"

When the proton breaks up so it's no longer a proton,

that's an interesting collision

And that happens only about 20 times

out of all these billions of protons crossing

In each of these powerful collisions,

dozens of new particles flash into existence

and spray outward, their unique signatures tracked

by the huge detectors,

capturing the action 40 million times a second

Incredibly fast, but still not able to spot the Higgs directly

The Higgs is actually kind of a difficult particle to find

It's kind of subtle in how you look for it

As soon as you create it, it decays very, very quickly

The lifetime of a Higgs is about one zeptosecond,

which is like ten to the minus 21 seconds

So, in fact, you'll never even see it

in a particle accelerator

It doesn't move that far,

enough for you to see any track left behind

And so, the only way to detect the Higgs would be by spotting

the more familiar particles

that the quickly vanishing Higgs decays into

The math predicted

about a dozen different possible decay modes, as they're called

But the relative likelihood of any of them

depended on the mass of the Higgs

which was a total mystery

It must have seemed like a cosmic joke on the theorists

The irony, if you like, is that

although the Higgs field that's related to the Higgs boson

gives other particles mass,

the one property of the Higgs boson that was not predicted

by Professor Higgs and his colleagues

was the mass of the Higgs boson itself

So its mass could have been anything

from very, very light by our standards to very, very heavy

Since the Higgs could theoretically decay

in so many different ways,

the Higgs hunters had to be willing to sift

through all of the collision debris,

looking for slight increases

in the number of detectable particles,

with very specific characteristics,

into which the Higgs could possibly decay

So it's not like looking for a needle in a haystack,

when at least you know that you found a needle

It's like looking for hay in a haystack

You're looking for a little bit more hay with certain properties

than certain other properties

That daunting challenge meant

building enormously complicated detectors

to track and count every bit of debris

coming out of those collisions

And then we have to somehow,

with all of the particles that come out of this event,

we have to reconstruct them and find if there are new particles

that are happening

The mathematics predicts that the Higgs should often decay

into particles that are also maddeningly hard to detect...

Like quarks, the particles that make up protons and neutrons

in the nuclei of atoms

They looked in every possible way they can look

In the end,

they looked for the Higgs boson decaying into photons

Out of every thousand Higgs bosons created,

a few should decay in a way that produces a pair of photons...

Light particles

which can be measured very precisely in the detectors

By knowing the energy and angle between pairs of photons,

scientists can tell if they were likely produced by a Higgs

And by looking for unexpectedly high concentrations

of certain photons over billions of collisions,

scientists hoped to zero in on the Higgs and, as a consequence,

pinpoint its exact mass...

The one missing value in the theory

It proved to be a statistical sifting process

of dizzying complexity

Luckily, they had a head start

Years of experiments in other colliders had ruled out

many possible masses for the Higgs,

measured in units called gigaelectronvolts, or GEV

So on this line of what the mass of the Higgs might be,

we can draw on what previous experiments have

have tried and where they've been able

to exclude it from being

A less powerful accelerator, the LEP Collider at CERN,

a predecessor of the LHC,

had already ruled out the Higgs being at the bottom end

of potential masses

In fact they were able to say that the mass of the Higgs

is, with 95% confidence, 114 GEV or more

So after LEP, the next major milestone in the

in the Higgs search was limits set by another collider

in the US, the Tevatron

The Tevatron was able to exclude

a range here around 160 GEV here

In 2011, CERN moved that upper boundary still lower

The LHC has been able to rule out a big region

from 145, quite far up

But this last remaining energy range

was also the trickiest to search

It's the area in which the unique signature of the Higgs

would be mostly deeply buried under the background noise

of other particles created in the collider

If I was to bet,

I would probably put it at 130 GEV

Probably somewhere around 120 GEV

Somewhere between 120 and 130 GEV

114 GEV because it's the most difficult place to look

and we haven't found it yet

Ah, that's a good question,

because you know you are assuming that the Higgs

actually exists, which I'm-I'm starting to believe

it probably does not exist

As data piled up at the LHC,

scientists narrowed the range even further

It seemed that they were either about to close in

on the Higgs particle or prove that it didn't exist at all

People were beginning to worry a little bit

that we hadn't found the Higgs yet

and maybe weren't going to find it

And that would've been a complete shock

because we know that something is doing the job of the Higgs

You start to get a little nervous

because either it's there

or there isn't a Higgs boson at all

By the end of 2011, the window narrowed even further

The LHC, with the new data from the whole of 2011,

is able to expand the area that it can exclude the Higgs from

The new lower limit had risen to 115 GEV,

and the new upper limit dropped to 127 GEV

And within that range,

interesting things were showing up in the data

So the really exciting thing

was that the reason the LHC experiments weren't able

to exclude anything inside this remaining window

is that in fact they see an excess of events,

the early signs of the Higgs boson, if it's there

An excess of events means that the LHC was producing

more particles of interest... In particular, pairs of photons

So, what you're looking for is called a bump

because at that particular energy,

you should see a lot more decays

if there is a Higgs boson

So if you see a bump, that's a clue that something's going on

Those excess photon pairs were showing up in not just one

but in both detectors, and at practically the same mass

CMS was seeing a spike in the number of photons

which could be the signal of a Higgs with a mass of 124 GEV

And ATLAS was seeing a similar spike near 125

Now with the hunt finally closing in,

the LHC continued smashing protons,

sorting through the debris and piling up the data

for another six months

We saw a signal growing, growing every week, every day

Until at last, on July 4, 2012, the heads of ATLAS and CMS,

Fabiola Gianotti and Joe Incandela, called a meeting

Two presentations from the two experiments, ATLAS and CMS

There to hear the news firsthand: Peter Higgs himself

It was standing room only

Good afternoon, everybody in Melbourne

But it was also beamed live around the world

So, of course,

everyone's heard lots of rumors at this point,

within the collaborations

But there are these two collaborations,

the CMS collaboration and the ATLAS collaboration

And we aren't supposed to know what they have, and I didn't

You know, you'd heard stories, but I hadn't seen their data

So that's kind of exciting

So, today is a special day on a search for a certain particle

But no one was quite prepared

for the short, definitive announcement that was to come

And I ask Joe Incandela from CMS to take the floor

This was about to become one of the defining moments

in the history of physics and science

And the energy was so incredible

It was like a big party

People were really excited

And it was just then I think I started to really appreciate

where we were and that this was a major discovery

This slide shows you one event taken just a few weeks ago

I put the slide up and before I could say anything,

there was a gasp across the whole audience

Now, a major result like this

from one experiment could still be wrong

Now we go immediately to ATLAS

Fabiola Gianotti, please

Thank you

But Fabiola brought the same confidence for her results

You can already see here the compatibility between

what we observed: one big spike, here in this region here

If you look at these plots that were shown,

first thing you want to see is

did CMS and ATLAS find the bump in the same place?

And in fact they had

An excess at a mass of 126 5 GEV

Both teams had found an excess of photons

pointing to the same mass

And that was pretty convincing

So you're going, "Wow," like, "we rock"

As a layman I would now say I think we have it

You agree?

The LHC had found the Higgs particle

We have observed a new particle consistent with a Higgs boson

It's like running a marathon

Suddenly you realize you crossed the finish line

Maybe one more round of applause to all the guys

who took part in the project for more than 25 years

It comes as a big surprise to me, I must say

I went into that seminar expecting good results

But I was gobsmacked, as they say

The hunt that spanned half a century was over

The Higgs boson hid for 50 years

But, you know, like they said with the Canadian Mounties,

"They'll get their man"

It could run, but it couldn't hide forever

It appeared Higgs and his colleagues had been right

The mystery of how particles gain mass had been solved

The last piece of the Standard Model had been found

For me it's really an incredible thing

that it's happened in my lifetime

I had the pleasure to meet Peter Higgs

at the end of the seminar and exchange a hug

He told me,

"Congratulations to you and your experiment

for this incredible achievement"

And of course, I replied, "Congratulations to you!

You are the first person to be congratulated"

I think it's not appropriate for me to answer

any detailed questions at this stage

This is an occasion celebrating an experimental achievement

and I simply congratulate the people involved

Ironically, the achievement took place at the very same institute

where nearly 50 years earlier,

an editor had rejected Higgs' initial paper

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

In a fitting end to the saga,

Peter Higgs and Belgian physicist François Englert,

who had independently come up with the idea

for the Higgs field, won the 2013 Nobel Prize

Englert's colleague, Robert Brout,

certainly would have been honored as well

had he lived to see the day

So why is all this important?

Why does proving the existence of the Higgs field matter?

Building an enormous Big Bang machine to recreate conditions

in the universe near the beginning of time

and completing the Standard Model

is a tremendous scientific achievement

Finding the Higgs sheds light on all of particle physics

and cosmology

It's all connected

All our models of how the universe began, how it expanded,

everything, is, you know, affected by the Higgs field

and by how we understand the universe

Perhaps discovering the Higgs boson and the field it proves

will open new doors

The discovery of the Higgs is just the first step

In science you make a step forward...

You answer a question, but then other questions open up

into even greater mysteries that still remain

beyond the Standard Model

The Standard Model can't be the final thing

There is something beyond the Standard Model; we know that

Hopefully the Higgs can give us some guidance in that direction

Yes, we do know the Standard Model works

It works incredibly well

But we know it's not the whole story

And any time in the history of physics

where people thought they had the whole story they were wrong

And so we're looking for what is the next piece,

not just in terms of one particle

but in terms of forces, in terms of understanding nature

The number of mysteries in the Standard Model is huge,

which is fine because, as a scientist,

I'm drawn to mysteries

One mystery that the Standard Model can't answer

is perhaps the most fundamental of them all

Why isn't our universe empty?

Because according to the mathematics

behind the Standard Model, it should be

Science has given us a set of laws that describe the world

so accurately that we can predict the motion of a coin

tossed in the air because we understand the law of gravity

We understand electromagnetism so well

that we can use our GPS satellites to locate your car

to within a few inches

And we understand the nuclear force so well

that we can predict the future evolution of the sun itself

Those mathematical equations that work so well

to describe the laws of the physical world

are bound together by something that we see around us every day

Something that characterizes our faces

and the natural world

even the tiniest structures like viruses and our DNA...

Symmetry

In the Standard Model, symmetry rules

The laws are dictated, really, in their form

by requiring tremendous amounts of symmetry

That's how we found them

The equations of the Standard Model seem to predict a universe

in perfect balance, formless and without structure

as it was at the very beginning

And if it had remained that way, nothing would exist

If the laws of science are framed in their most perfect,

most symmetrical form, then life cannot exist at all

There'd be no mountains, rivers, valleys,

no DNA, no people, nothing

A universe created along absolutely symmetric principles

would be in perfect balance

The Higgs field is the first clue to what broke the symmetry

of that completely uniform early universe

The state of perfect symmetry is very similar

to the state of perfect balance

Think of a spinning top

It exists in a state of perfect rotational symmetry

No matter how you rotate, everything looks the same

Even more so than the symmetry of a spinning top,

at this instant of creation,

every place in the universe would have been symmetrical,

identical to every other place

But perfection isn't stable

The slightest imperfection, the slightest little defect

will cause it to vibrate, perturb,

and fall to a lower energy state

Symmetry has been broken

Within a fraction of a second of the Big Bang,

physicists believe the absolute symmetry of the universe

was shattered by a tiny fluctuation

The Higgs field appeared in all of space

The forces split apart

The particles of the Standard Model became distinct

Structure emerged

This fall from perfection was what allowed us

to come into being

Everything we see around us is nothing but fragments

of this original perfection

Whenever you see a beautiful snowflake, a beautiful crystal,

or even the symmetry of stars in the universe, that's a fragment

That's a piece of the original symmetry

at the beginning of time

Finding and studying the Higgs is a vital first step

in the quest to understand that early state

when the particles that make up what we can perceive

came into being, as well as a much greater quantity

of mysterious stuff that we know is out there

but that we can't directly detect, called dark matter

What are these missing pieces?

When James Gates came to study at MIT,

he was determined to unlock the secrets of the early universe

and understand what happened to the unity that was once there

The universe and we are intricately tied together

This idea of unity turns out to be

one of the most powerful driving themes in physics

and it keeps getting us to look

for deeper and deeper connections

So ultimately, perhaps, we exist

because the universe had no other choice

He looked at the Standard Model,

the matter particles and the bosons, the force particles,

that hold everything together

He wondered if these two groups of particles

that seem so different could be related

in some profound and hidden way

This question...

Why is there a fundamental asymmetry of forces and matter...

Led him to a powerful mathematical theory

called supersymmetry

It was the asking of this "what if?" question

that drove the construction of supersymmetry,

which had an incredible resonance for me

when I was a graduate student

I saw one more beautiful balance that we could put in nature

One of the pioneers of supersymmetry,

Jim Gates saw in the mathematics a possible hidden world

of new particles no one had suspected

Mathematics leads us to find things we didn't know

were there before

Supersymmetry is an example of that

We know about ordinary matter

The mass leads you on

to discover supermatter and superenergy

The theory gives every matter particle a force partner

and every force particle a matter partner

These heavier supersymmetric twins are labeled sparticles

So once you believe this math

that says there's more to existence,

then you have to wonder what these other things are

You have to name them, at a very

you know, at the very first step

So in nature there is a thing called the electron

The math says it has a superpartner

called the selectron

Muon, it'd have to be a smuon;

photon, there'd have to be a photino;

quark, there'd have to be squarks;

Z particle, there'd have to be zino;

the W particle, there'd have to be a wino

And that's how supersymmetry works

According to supersymmetry,

matter and forces aren't so distinct after all

There's a grand symmetry between them

but we can currently see only one partner from each pair

However strange it seems,

this theory has gained widespread support

from theoretical physicists

Not just for the beauty of its equations

but for what it might help explain

When supersymmetry began as a topic of discussion,

no one realized what it can do

It turns out that studying the mathematics,

we get a firm foundation for the existence of everything

Supersymmetry could shed light on dark matter...

The missing particles that aren't included

in the Standard Model... And even help to explain

how symmetry was broken in the first place

I very much want supersymmetry

because it's a beautiful thing by any standard

and would take our understanding of nature to a new level

So I want that

Finding the Higgs pushed the LHC to the limit

of what it could do

So, a few months after the Higgs announcement

the scientists at CERN shut down the giant collider

and began a planned two-year upgrade

As it begins its second act,

it will smash protons even more energetically

So when the LHC turns back on in 2015,

we will be at twice the energy we were before

The increased power will help physicists to study the Higgs

with more precision, but the real hope is that they will find

something entirely new

Every single experimentalist is only thinking this:

Is there a massive particle we can now make with this energy,

with these energetic protons, that we haven't seen before?

For the theorists, too,

it is an exciting and nerve-wracking time

If we find supersymmetry in experiments, for me personally

it will mean that I have not wasted my entire research career

because this is the one question as a young scientist

I decided had my name on it to study

I'm starting to get nervous

You know

So there were a lot of people who predicted

that supersymmetry was just around the corner

or something else, that as soon as LHC turned on

they'd see spectacular effects on the one hand,

or that the Higgs particle would be heavy on the other hand

Those are all wrong

Now it's make or break time

For the thousands of scientists who have come together

in this great quest,

pushing the frontiers of knowledge

has been a wild rollercoaster ride

And with the Large Hadron Collider

Three, two, one

zero

The fun has only just begun